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Essay on Global Warming

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The sky is falling, the sky is falling! Growing up I heard this phrase in folktales as a “wolf cry”-- a cry that is so ridiculous that nobody would believe it. Now that global warming is a major environmental issue, the saying doesn’t sound so out of place. Most people might say: what is global warming? That’s the question that was running through my mind when I first heard we were watching a documentary on it in my class. The film is Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and it is about the causes of global warming and what it is doing to our planet. Being an environmentally involved citizen and growing up with conservative Republicans as parents, I was torn between not really liking Gore and this extreme reality that I felt was an …show more content…

This is called the greenhouse effect.

This entrapped CO2 is causing glaciers all around the world to melt, creating heat waves on the earth, increasing ocean temperatures, precipitation, and droughts, shifting seasons, and melting ice caps. The issue of heat waves really caught my attention, as they will increase and be unbearable for people to live in. In 2003, for example, there was a heat wave in Europe that reached over 120 degrees and killed 35,000 Europeans (Gore 2006). Ocean temperatures and increased precipitation will cause horrific storms such as hurricanes, typhoons, tornados, and stronger wind and rain storms. Gore claims that we’ve already seen this in the past couple of years with hurricanes like Katrina; in the past ten years the U.S. had an all time record for tornadoes in 2004 and Japan had an all time record for typhoons another year. Studies also show that ice caps have diminished at an unbelievable rate of 40% in the past 40 years! This melting is suspected to raise sea levels by around 80 feet which would flood major cities like San Francisco, Manhattan, Beijing, Shanghai, India, and more, displacing and killing hundreds and millions of people (Gore, 2006). Imagine the effects of Hurricane Katrina times one hundred. Shifted seasons and environmental changes will lead to the extinction of animals. In the film Gore stated that scientists were

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